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A faint cry rose from her. Awkwardly, she made her way closer, and a moment later found herself half sitting, half slumped against a fragmented slab of plastered wall, staring down at the dying bear’s torn and shredded head.

The Hound was gasping as well, its back end buried beneath the giant bear, red foam bubbling from its nostrils, each breath shallower and wetter than the one before, until finally, with a single, barely audible sigh, it died.Advertisement

Samar Dev’s attention returned to the god that had so haunted her, ever looming, ever testing the air… seeking… what? ‘What!’ she asked it now in a hoarse whisper. ‘What did you want?’

The beast’s one remaining eye seemed to shift slightly inside its ring of red. In it, she saw only pain. And loss.

The witch drew out her knife. Was this the thing to do? Should she not simply let it go? Let it leave this unjust, heartless existence? The last of its kind. Forgotten by all…

Well, I will not forget you, my friend.

She reached down with the knife, and slipped the blade into the pool of blood beneath the bear’s head. And she whispered words of binding, repeating them over and over again, until at last the light of life departed the god’s eye.

Clutching two Hounds with a third one writhing in his mouth, Tulas Shorn could do little more than shake the beasts half senseless as the dragon climbed ever higher above the mountains north of Lake Azure. Of course, he could do one more thing. He could drop them from a great height. Which he did. With immense satisfaction.

‘Wait! Wait! Stop it! Stop!’

Iskaral Pust climbed free of the ruckus-the mound of thrashing, snarling, spitting and grunting bhokarala, the mass of tangled, torn hair and filthy robes and prickly toes that was his wife, and he glared round.

‘You idiots! He isn’t even here any more! Gah, it’s too late! Gah! That odious, slimy, putrid lump of red-vested dung! No, get that away from me, ape.’ He leapt to his feet. His mule stood alone. ‘What good are you?’ he accused the beast, rais-ing a fist.

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Mogora climbed upright, adjusting her clothes. She then stuck out her tongue, which seemed to be made entirely of spiders.

Seeing this, Iskaral Pust gagged. ‘Gods! No wonder you can do what you do!’

She cackled. ‘And oh how you beg for more!’

‘Aagh! If I’d known, I’d have begged for something else!’

‘Oh, what would you have begged for, sweetie?’

‘A knife, so I could cut my own throat. Look at me. I’m covered in bites!’

‘They got sharp teeth, all right, them bhokarala-.’

‘Not them, month-old cream puff. These are spider bites!’

‘You deserve even worse! Did you drug her senseless? There’s no other way she’d agree to-’

‘Power! I have power! It’s irresistible, everybody knows that! A man can look like a slug! His hair can stick out like a bhederin’s tongue! He can be knee-high and perfectly proportioned-he can stink, he can eat his own earwax, none of it matters! If he has power!’

‘Well, that’s what’s wrong with the world, then. It’s why ugly people don’t just die out.’ And then she smiled. ‘It’s why you and me, we’re made for each other! Let’s have babies, hundreds of babies!’

Iskaral Pust ran to his mule, scrabbled aboard, and fled for his life.

The mule walked, seemingly unmindful of the rider thrashing and kicking about on its back, and at a leisurely saunter, Mogora kept pace.

The bhokarala, which had been cooing and grooming in a reconciliatory love fest, now flapped up into the air, circling over their god’s head like gnats round the sweetest heap of dung ever beheld.

Approaching thunder startled Picker from her reverie within the strange cave, and she stared upon the carved rock wall, eyes widening to see the image of the carriage blurring as if in motion.

If the monstrosity was indeed pounding straight for her, moments from ex-ploding into the cavern, then she would be trampled, for there was nowhere to go in the hope of evading those rearing horses and the pitching carriage behind them.

An absurd way for her soul to die-

The apparition arrived in a storm of infernal wind, yet it emerged from the wall ghostly, almost transparent, and she felt the beasts and the conveyance tear through her-a momentary glimpse of a manic driver, eyes wide and staring, both legs jutting out straight and splayed and apparently splinted. And still others, on the carriage roof and tossing about on the ends of straps from the sides, expressions stunned and jolted. All of this, sweeping through her, and past- pqdm.com